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AWS Documentation » AWS Systems Manager » User Guide » AWS Systems Manager Insights » AWS Systems Manager Inventory

AWS Systems Manager Inventory

AWS Systems Manager Inventory provides visibility into your Amazon EC2 and on-premises computing environment. You can use Inventory to collect metadata from your managed instances. You can store this metadata in a central Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, and then use built-in tools to query the data and quickly determine which instances are running the software and configurations required by your software policy, and which instances need to be updated. You can configure Inventory on all of your managed instances by using a one-click procedure. You can also configure and view inventory data from multiple AWS Regions and accounts.

If the pre-configured metadata types collected by Systems Manager Inventory don't meet your needs, then you can create custom inventory. Custom inventory is simply a JSON file with information that you provide and add to the managed instance in a specific directory. When Systems Manager Inventory collects data, it captures this custom inventory data. For example, if you run a large datacenter, you can specify the rack location of each of your servers as custom inventory. You can then view the rack space data when you view other inventory data.

Important

Systems Manager Inventory collects only metadata from your managed instances. Inventory does not access proprietary information or data.

The following table lists the types of metadata that you can collect with Systems Manager Inventory.

Configuration Details

Metadata types

You can configure Inventory to collect the following types of metadata:

  • Applications: Application names, publishers, versions, etc.

  • AWS components: EC2 driver, agents, versions, etc.

  • Files: Name, size, version, installed date, modification and last accessed times, etc.

  • Network configuration: IP address, MAC address, DNS, gateway, subnet mask, etc.

  • Windows updates: Hotfix ID, installed by, installed date, etc.

  • Instance details: System name, operating systems (OS) name, OS version, last boot, DNS, domain, work group, OS architecture, etc.

  • Services: Name, display name, status, dependent services, service type, start type, etc.

  • Tags: Tags assigned to your instances.

  • Windows Registry: Registry key path, value name, value type, and value.

  • Windows roles: Name, display name, path, feature type, installed state, etc.

  • Custom inventory: Metadata that was assigned to a managed instance as described in Working with Custom Inventory.

Note

To view a list of all metadata collected by Inventory, see Metadata Collected by Inventory.

Instances to collect information from

You can choose to inventory all instances in your AWS account, individually select instances, or target groups of instances by using Amazon EC2 tags. For more information about performing inventory collection on all of your instances, see Inventory All Managed Instances in Your AWS Account.

When to collect information

You can specify a collection interval in terms of minutes, hours, days, and weeks. The shortest collection interval is every 30 minutes.

Note

Depending on the amount of data collected, the system can take several minutes to report the data to the output you specified. After the information is collected, the metadata is sent over a secure HTTPS channel to a plain-text AWS store that is accessible only from your AWS account.

You can view the data in the AWS Systems Manager console on the Inventory page, which includes several predefined cards to help you query the data.

Systems Manager Inventory cards in the Systems Manager console.

Note

Inventory cards automatically filter out Amazon EC2 managed instances with a state of Terminated and Stopped. For on-premises managed instances, Inventory cards automatically filter out instances with a state of Terminated.

If you create a Resource Data Sync to synchronize and store all of your data in a single Amazon S3 bucket, then you can drill down into the data on the Inventory Detailed View page. For more information, see Querying Inventory Data from Multiple Regions and Accounts.

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